President/CEO Victor Erickson tells ResourceClips.com, “We first visited the property on a reconnaissance basis almost two years ago and were very impressed with the fact that there were 12 historical pits spread over about four miles. The property was mined between 1988 and 1994, and the alteration in the reclaimed pits was very impressive. There was a technical paper written by one of the geologists on the project during its assembly in the late 1970s, and that paper was pretty optimistic of the potential beneath the 12 pits. So we checked out the land position and were very surprised to learn that other than the patented land, which is around 600 acres, all the ground was open. So we looked at the project as being possibly a deep Carlin-type environment.

I think we have a strong opportunity here to take something that was regarded as having spotty mineralization and turn it into something much larger—Victor Erickson

“It took the better part of a year to assemble the four leases that cover the ground to do our initial staking, and we managed to get a hold of a lot of historical data—some of which was digitized after the mine shut down and another major had looked at it, I think, in 1997. And we concluded that there was a lot of lower-grade material and some mineable grade. At the time they were mining it they weren’t doing broad exploration; they were trying to add tonnes to keep the mine running. Under the circumstances—with $350 gold and very high royalties—they didn’t have an opportunity to back out of the trees and look at the forest. While there was a general understanding of the geology, our impression is that the keys to exploration weren’t fully understood.”

Erickson continues, “We inherited more than 1,200 drill holes as far as assays were concerned, and there is a fair amount of low-grade material left, and the metallurgy is excellent. We drilled in an area where a small resource had been delineated in the 1990s. We put three drill holes in, as you can see, and they were drilled in opposite directions purposely to determine the bounding fault to the system, and we came up with better widths and grade. We’re going to go in with some drilling on the next stage and try to tie down the structural controls better and proceed.

“The graben [ie, a depressed block of land bordered by parallel faults] is about eight kilometres long between the two most distant pits. Obviously, the whole eight kilometres is a target, but the immediate target is really about two kilometres by a half-kilometre, and that’s the area we will attempt to delineate. We have a reasonable royalty; we hold this thing 100%; and I think we have a strong opportunity here to take something that was regarded as having spotty mineralization and turn it into something much larger, but obviously at lower grade than was mined historically. But we have to finance shortly so we can proceed with drilling. We are entering into discussions [about a financing] probably this week.”

Erickson says of the drill results, “They are excellent. And there is no high grade carrying those intercepts. It’s relatively consistent values across.”

Erickson notes that it is too early to say when the company will have a maiden resource for the Goldstrike project. “The first target is one to two kilometres long by a half kilometre wide. We know there’s mineralization in there but, from the record, were not able to determine what the ore controls are. So I think the first thing is to try and figure out the ore controls. How do we best target mineralization from this small corner of the property into the rest of it? I won’t call this a discovery hole because it was drilled into mineralization that was known, but I think just with these few holes we have a better understanding of how we should proceed with our exploration and maximize our efficiency.

“It’s going to take a fair amount of money to explore this thing,” Erickson concludes. “There are a lot of reasons to draw parallels between this and the deep Carlin or deep Cortez [trends]. This is a Carlin environment and the ground in this particular area is being pounded up. It’s right on the edge of the Great Basin and being pounded up against the Colorado Plateau. It’s really extensively broken up geologically speaking, so the plumbing is in place, and no one’s discovered the source for mineralization. The nearest intrusive is six miles away, and that’s too far to influence mineralization on this thing. One of the big questions is what is down deep? In this day and age everyone is undertaking deeper drilling all the way along the Carlin Trend. There have been a number of discoveries by going deeper. That’s not our immediate target; that’s for later on. But that potential we think is very real. [Goldstrike] has got real near-term potential, and it has some very strong longer-term potential as well.”